The Mockingbird's Ballad

The icicles were six inches long on the back porch roof edge. The great light had just crested over the tree line east towards Dellrose. Lou pulled her heavy coat tight at the worn collar with one hand. In her other hand the steaming coffee mug offered a cloud of steam that was trapped in front of her face by her broad hat brim. She liked this time of day best - light renewed, sunrise. She greeted it most days right on this spot on her house's small back porch. To her left was sunrise and to her right was the barn she and her family had rebuilt four springs ago. She could hear the stock shifting in the barn stalls and lot pens. The old Dominicker rooster had sung his harsh morning reveille just a few minutes before. Lou and he were in an ongoing contest to see who would be the first to recognize the beginning of the daylight.

Alex came through the back door with his coffee. "Sister. Dang, it's brisk, wouldn't you say?" was his greeting to his twin sister.

"Yes, Alex, but it's the third of December, don't you know."

At twenty-two-years old the twins were the shape and size of adults. Lou was now 5' 9" tall and weighed 118 pounds and Alex was 5' 7" and 189 pounds.

Alex had left the major, become colonel and the shallow of Wheeler's cavalry, in April after the colonel had near kicked him out. "It's over boy, git home, they need you," he'd said.

Alex had showed up late spring of '65 worn out and sickly. By fall the family had restored his physical health and Lou's dreams had restored his spirit. He was her counsel, alter ego and jester. He was a good worker in spirit and a good talker all the time.

"The long and short of the Fields," Grandfather John L. teased them. He, their grandmother Mama Bear, mother Nancy Bird, Uncle Joe T. and aunt Mary Jane were stirring in the kitchen. The women were working on breakfast and the men on the stove and fireplace. In spring and summer the house was awake and functioning quite a bit before the rooster's morning song, but in winter the waking time was later.

The Fields and Mayberry families had come to Dellrose to begin again in late 1865. Mama Bear's thirty or more years of herb sales and doctoring folks over in the Sequatchie had provided them enough hard money to buy their new place at a sheriff's sale. They started a new life in a place less poisoned by the war. With Grand John L. as straw boss and Lou as working boss, the new farm had taken shape. The first crops of corn and tobacco had been poor but the women's garden was abundant. The second season's row crops were better and the garden was faithful. Good corn crops followed yearly. The mules and horses were healthy and their numbers had increased from five to nine. Two milk cows provided enough milk for them. Five pigs had provided enough meat to share with neighbors. The chicken pen was home to 9 hens and the rooster. Guinea fowl found the leavings from stock feed to be ample provisions. They provided eggs that were richer than the chicken's eggs. A barn had been rebuilt, Lou's forge set up, smoke house improved, cistern under the back porch repaired, and some of the rock field walls had been put in fairly good shape, but there was still more to do on the border of the other fields. Lou and Alex would be working on that this Friday morning after milking and feeding the animals. Tomorrow the family would go the fifteen miles to Fayetteville to get some supplies.